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REVIEWS 41 The Non-Conformist A Map of Days: Life on the Left, by Denis Freney. Heinemann 1991. $24.95. Reviewed by Roy For­ ward. For nearly 40 years Denis Freney has been the radical p o­ litical agitator par excellence, deeply involving himself in campaigns for student rights, the Labor split, the NSW Teachers' Federation, the ALP, the CPA, various trotskyist groups, anti-apartheid—in­ cluding stopping the Springboks— Algerian inde­ pendence through the FLN, self-management, the Vietnam war, gay lib, Aboriginal rights, East Timor and Fretilin, the Nugan Hand bank, Polish Solidarity and now the New Left Party. To a big output in Journalism and pamphleteer­ ing he h a s ad d ed v a lu a b le works on the CIA's Australian connections, on Nazi terrorism in Australia and on Timor. to be a valuable strategist to have on year quantitatively this century) your side. Denis is also worth reading on what it was like growing up in the 1940s and Now, in this scintillating autobiog­ His revolutionary work took him to raphy, Denis emerges as one of our 50s. His frankness makes it easy for us over 20 countries on many occasions. to identify with his experiences, very best writers. He is his own hero, Given his love of mixing business and that is the autobiographer's though I'm not sure how far we can with pleasure he is suitably wry about generalise from his habit of adding privilege, but in Denis' case it is com­ being a revolutionary tourist, though pletely justified and ensures that the tomato sauce to tripe in white sauce to he has never been to the Soviet Union, give a bright pink result story of his personal and political de­ China, Vietnam or the Americas. It is velopment is enthralling, entertaining clear that he has relished it all, includ­ and thought-provoking. I am left with Naturally, it is a frankness which is ing the self-sacrifidng grind of or­ shaped. For example he tells us about enormous fellow-feeling with, and ganisational work that was also admiration for, the subject/author. his earlier heterosexual and his later sometimes dangerously illegal. homosexual encounters, thereby also Not content with fighting one good He is wickedly good at the thumbnail tracing the changing sexual mores of cause after another he has always sketch, so the book is worth buying Australians in the 1950s to the 1980s. agonised over the great question of just for those of Douglas Darby, Bob But by telling us about them now, and revolution versus reform, coming up, Brown, Bruce McFarlane, Paddy Mc- by not telling us about other aspects of not surprisingly, with different Guinness, Bob Gould, Nick Origlass, his sexual life, he is following a script answers at different times and for dif­ Bob Askin, Ken Kemshead, Joe Harris, society has written for him. That ferent countries. His highly- Laurie Aarons, Ken Coates, Robin script, even in an age of gross over­ developed ability to learn from Blackburn, Brian Laver, Albert population and rampant AIDS, con­ experience and to change his ideas Langer, Joe Palmada, Alec and Mavis tinues to link sex and personal when they get too out of accord with Robertson, Bemie Taft and others. relationships. Omitted, after a refer­ facts leaves him musing over what ence to his first wet dreams, is the most this makes him now. Whatever his As one of the small band of Austra­ common sexual practice by answer, it is obvious he will continue lians bom in 1936 (the least productive everybody—be they homos, heteros 42 REVIEWS or lesos—and that is masturbation. In his 20s and 30s he found it impos­ Since the personal is political, the con­ sible to reconcile the political, sexual sequences of this kind of self-censor­ and family parts of his life. His need ship could do with some analysis: it to earn money also led him into fur­ probably perpetuates the loading of ther compartmentalisation as, when responsibility for one's sexual relief in South Africa, he taught white onto others (mainly, I suspect, by men children the contents of apartheid onto women) and privatises the textbooks by rote. He was able to find process of growth so that self-loathing a more unified identity eventually by or narcissistic self-love are the out­ comes. I Cooper) all i Even when he is frank he is sometimes 'family' and reconstructing more incurious about himself, as about the adult relationships with them. sources of occasional outbursts of physical violence. In every other For all that he remains a loner, al­ respect he presents himself as an al­ though he does seem always to have most unbelievable goody-goody who enjoyed a close relationship with one would "never even think of" crossing of his younger sisters. It has given him a school playground dividing line, a lot of not unwelcome freedom, and was "prudish" about sex, "had a has been a precondition for his full­ puritanical attitude towards cigaret­ time activism—which in tum has tes", was "embarrassed" at public given him many compensations for swearing, and so on. He even claims, his lonesomeness. surely disingenuously, that he "never injected my political views on the There is also a problem about his edu­ His conclusion is that his first 50 years Vietnam war, socialism or anything cation. Sometimes university is "had been fulfilling and the fight else into my classroom teaching". But wasted on the young, so it is distress­ worth fighting...Happiness was a on violence he lets it hang out: the dent ing to realise that Denis graduated transitory illusion, while joy was in the kitchen wall where he hurled a when he had only just turned 19. For something seldom experienced but frying pan at a younger sister in "one he tells us nothing about any intellec­ which lived forever. It was won only of those arguments about washing tual awakening for him there, or any through struggle, fought alone, suck­ and drying up"; and while others held scholar's influence, or any great ing the stones of the desert of one's a Nazi on the ground he "began kick­ debates—only that he crammed inner self." I would add what modesty ing his bald head. My rubber-soled before each annual exam and wrote forbade him saying—that those yean desert boots bounced ineffectively off one history essay on the abolition of also show a remarkable record of it as he whimpered like a child". Yet slavery in the West Ind ies and another achievement on behalf of others. he says "my father never raised a hand on nationalism which paraphrased against any of us, ever" and nowhere Stalin. Denis is inclined to blame him­ speculates about what could cause self and his political work, but it must ROY FORWARD recently returned to such uncharacteristic behaviour in be true that in large part he was let Canberra after teaching Australian himself. down by Sydney University itself. studies in China. ADVERTISE with Australian Left Review For Information on advertising contact Ros Bragg on (02) 281 7668 REVIEWS 43 Anal Sects Redemption. A Novel by Tariq The ageing Einstein/Mandel decides lians' (the Percy brothers' Democratic Ali. Cnatto & Windus (London) to rebuild the movement by holding a Socialist Party/Socialist Workers 1990. $39.95 and T h e N ew special world congress at which he Party) refuse to attend, after splitting will unveil his latest grand scheme to because they backed Brezhnev on Af­ American Fascism by Dennis achieve political salvation. He decides ghanistan. King. Doubleday, USA 1988. to invite all his old enemies in the Reviewed by Denis Freney. various splinter trotskyist sects. I knew quite a few of the main charac­ ters satirised by Ali and although Tariq Ali is one of best known First there are the Americans of there's naturally exaggeration in the trotskyists in the English- PISPAW (Proletarian International portrayal of them, it's not as great as the uninitiated may think. Fact is speaking world. In the tur­ stranger than fiction in the world of bulent years of protest against TARIQ ALI the sects! the Vietnam War and the birth of student radicalism, Tariq Ali And when the fractured trotskyist was to Britain what Danny the church deddes to unite in a new form of 'entrism', the brilliant condusion of Red was to France. They were REDEMPTION the book has a crazy logic... both outsiders— Cohn-Bendit a German Jew and Ali a Pakis­ Tariq Ali's satire reminded me of the tani. Danny was an anarchist broader impact cults have had over the past 20 years. Most think of these and Tariq a trotskyist, but cults as being exdusively religious, nevertheless they had much in arising from the upsurge of interest in common. Eastern religions and old-style Bible Belt fundamentalism. They've drawn Tariq remained a follower of Ernst on modem psychological techniques Mandel, the Belgian marxist whose and the sophisticated science of mass prolific writings cover a bewildering marketing, public relations and media number of topics. Now it appears the manipulation. relationship has ended, in part as a result of the impact of events in East­ The political cults/sects have learned ern Europe and the USSR in recent \ NOVI i from their competitors in the religious years. field. The classic example are the La- Rouchians, followers of former Ali's satire on the trotskyist move­ Socialist Party of American Workers) trotskyist Lyndon LaRouche, now in ment renders Mandel as the model for modelled closely on the US trotskyist prison in the United States for fraud.

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